The place where I page to when my brain is full up of stuff about the Microsoft platform

64 bit

I have seen some comments on the tweet sphere about SharePoint 2010 only being available as a 64 bit application. I don’t have a problem with this for a number of reasons:

SharePoint like SQL Server loves memory and as document sizes and the richness of content stored in SharePoint grows then 2/3Gb i snot really going to work.

Windows Server 2008 is the last 32 bit server operating system from Microsoft – Windows Server 2008 r2 is also only 64 bit.

Virtualisation platforms like Hyper-V can happily run 64 bit virtual machines so this is not a constraint either.

Of course SharePoint is built on SQL server but unlike SharePoint SQL Server will continue to be 32 bit as it needs to run on pretty well anything from phones, to netbooks and notebooks and onward to servers and data centres.

Why am I rambling on about SharePoint because along with SQL Server it’s the core of Microsoft’s BI platform,and I’m preparing for a combined SQL SharePoint event of which more later.

I believe you’re mistaken about SQL Server continuing to run on 32-bit. Microsoft announced at the PDC and in the following blog post that SQL 2008 R2 (to be released in the first half of 2010) will be 64-bit only: